Communications companies (e.g., telecommunications operators and/or service providers) financial charge customers/subscribers using various mechanisms such as account billing in return for services rendered to the customers/subscribers by the communication companies. The revenue realized by communications companies upon customer payment defrays, among other things, the initial capital outlay and maintenance of the network infrastructure, as well as day-to-day operating costs.
For sake of management and financial administration the communications company (e.g., “operator”) typically maintains or has access to an electronic accounting system, e.g., a charging system. The electronic accounting system can comprise one or more nodes or service points included in or connected to an operator's network (e.g., a core network, for example). The electronic accounting system typically maintains information in the form of an accounting ledger, subscriber profile or the like for each customer/subscriber. Various features or rules can be associated with a customer/subscriber for determining or reflecting utilization privileges of the customer/subscriber for the communications network and the financial billing considerations which are associated with those privileges. These features or rules can be pre-arranged, e.g., by contract, between the operator and the customer/subscriber.
Some features or rules affecting service utilization and billing now popular with customer/subscriber are those which involve social communities of customers/subscribers. One of these features is the fleet service, where the operator gives discounts to the calls between subscribers inside a fleet. Another popular social community feature is the “family and friends” service, which allows a customer/subscriber to select or otherwise mark a set of other customers/subscribers with whom communications services are financially charged at a reduced or more favorable rate than ordinarily would be the case.
The “Family and Friends” (FaF) feature is thus an existing feature of some operator charging systems which enables discounting of voice and other traffic (e.g., short message service [SMS]) based on list of favorite numbers and number series. Example embodiments of the Family and Friends feature are described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,260,193, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. The Family and Friends feature allows the operator to define lists of numbers for which specific (favored) tariffs will be associated with a particular customer/subscriber. The lists of Family and Friends numbers can be connected to a subscription or to an account and thus make it possible to build further and advanced discounting logic. See, e.g., Hidalgo and Rodriguez (2008), The Dynamics of a Mobile Phone Network, Physica A, 378, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
In most implementations the Family and Friends feature is rather inflexible and static. For example, a customer/subscriber typically must opt for participation in the Family and Friends feature, e.g., the customer/subscriber must affirmatively declare an interest in the service. Moreover, the Family and Friends list associated with the customer/subscriber remains essentially static and does not reflect any changes in social behavior and/or social preferences of the customer/subscriber. By “static” is meant that the list of Family and Friends participants cannot be changed without human intervention, e.g., intervention in the form of interaction with either the customer/subscriber or an employee of the operator. For example, in some systems a customer/subscriber must call or contact the operator if the customer/subscriber wishes to change his/her list of Family and Friends participants, e.g., using a customer care (CC) or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system/office of the operator.